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I Won’t Mail It In

According to the latest Field Poll, I am one of a shrinking number of Californians who still votes the old-fashioned way — by showing up at the polls. Since 2002, the number of absentee voters in the Golden State has tripled, and absentees cast 47 percent of the ballots in the last election.

But call me a young fogey (it won’t be the first time), I just can’t buy into the idea of mailing in my ballot. It feeds too many of my paranoias:

What if my ballot gets lost in the mail? At least when you enter your choices into a machine, you know they’ve been received.

What if I change my mind after I put my ballot in the mail? If I vote in person, I have up until the last minute to reconsider my decision.

And what happens to that satisfaction of having completed one’s civic duty? Do you really feel like you’ve participated in the great American experiment simply by licking the seal of an envelope and dropping it into a mailbox?

Never mind that I’ve never lost anything in the mail before, that I’ve never changed my mind about how to vote in the final weeks of an election, and that, really, my sense of civic fulfillment from voting ain’t that grand in the first place. (I refuse to wear those “I voted” stickers; they just seem too self-congratulatory.)

Still, the mail-in thing’s just not for me. Maybe it’s generational. Growing up, only seniors and shut-ins sent in their ballots. Besides, in our paperless age, doing anything by mail seems so retro. Heck, I don’t even deign to pay my electric bill through the USPS — why in the world would I choose my president that way?

Now maybe if we could vote online, or text in our choice, I could get on board with that.

But till then, my poor precinct workers are going to have to put up with seeing me, Election Day after Election Day …

I don’t vote absentee unless it’s absolutely essential (out of town, etc.) I value the ritual carrying out of our civic duty and privilege (and take my kids along, to try to instill it into them).

I don’t consider voting by mail very secure. This is a structural criticism, not an empirical one. There is very little in the system to detect, prevent, or punish someone from voting his wife’s, elderly (or dead) parent’s, or even neighbor’s ballot (e.g., from a rural unsecured mailbox.) — federal mail fraud charges aren’t what they used to be.

I don’t see a lot of evidence that this misbehavior is taking place in great numbers, but our franchise ought to be worth securing a little better. In this regard, vote-by-mail, like vote-by-maybe-validated-cross-your-fingers-and-trust-the-vendor
computer, is a less secure system: a false economy.